She was fascinated in spite of herself, although there was no way to know what they were. You were supposed to already know that, she supposed, or perhaps the only one who needed to know didn’t need little notes and plaques.
There were ancient books as well. She’d seen a few like them in retreats and seminaries, but they were old and prized, or ceremonial, and never opened save by the Minister of the Service. She couldn’t read them, of course; reading had been a lost art since people could hook into a computer for anything they wanted or needed. Still, she knew that some of them were ancient religious texts by their decoration, possibly Bibles.
How odd that a man such as this would have such a love of religious art, religious settings for the gems, and religious books.
She was still uncomfortable, though. She knew she wasn’t here to see this collection, and as much as she was pleased to once again be able to walk around and feel almost human again, it wasn’t the time or place for admiration.
Angel walked around a case and into the center area, which proved to be a statuary garden. She felt uneasy at discovering this, remembering Wallinchky’s comments about “living statues,” but these did seem to be pretty much what they seemed. Again, the accent was on ancient, but many of these sculptures, the Terran ones anyway, had erotic poses or themes. It was hard to tell with the non-Terran ones, but there was a definite theme. Men in erotic poses with women, in erotic poses with other men, women in erotic poses with other women, and with unfamiliar but clearly animal creatures.
She knew she should look away and pray, but she couldn’t stop looking at the sculptures, nor could she explain the odd gut-level reaction she had to them.
In the middle was a round area of especially deep, thick, furlike carpet with erotic designs visible in the middle. Ming was lying there, in a pose not unlike some of the statuary.
As expected, Ming looked very much like she did—the artificial arms and legs. The artificial look and fluidity of movement of a person also had the same fluidity as her own movements.
“Ming? Are you all right?” she asked.
“Just put your mind in some other place and don’t think,” Ming replied, her voice not sounding right. It sounded… well, sultry, even deeper than it had been. She was moaning and breathing funny, and yet she managed, “They got us all wired up. You can’t fight it. Just try to think of other things.”
But Angel couldn’t think of other things, and as she knelt down to see to her friend, she felt—strange. Not unpleasant, not like the artificial limbs, but like she’d never felt before, except perhaps once, in a fit of religious ecstasy at her ordination. But this was much more physically intense, though mentally confusing, since she could keep a little of herself apart and could not understand it.
And after a while Jules Wallinchky got into it with them; she remembered that much, and she tried with what little corner of her was left to push him away, to get him out of there, but her body kept doing what he wanted no matter what she tried. Ming had been wrong. Wallinchky had the ultimate power trip in mind, and he went at it with gusto.
“Angel, you have to talk.”
“Go away! I just want to die, but they will not even let me do that!”
Ming shook her head. “Poor kid,” she breathed, then realized that in fact Angel was just a kid. Not only a young woman barely past whatever girlhood that order allowed, but with lifelong religious indoctrination and sequestering from most men in the retreats and religious schools, and even from the mission, where Angel had said there were only two Terran males on the whole planet, which was otherwise inhabited by an agrarian race of some kind of small lizard folk.
Evil was something you saw in videos and interlinks, or heard about second- or thirdhand or from religious instructors. When evil did appear, it was the unforeseen injury or death, the horrible storm that wipes out the crops, that kind of thing. And when you were out in company pretending to be just another citizen, the martial arts and mind control tricks were generally enough to save you. Otherwise, somebody shot you and you went to Heaven or whatever. Many trillions knew evil firsthand, of course, although a large percentage didn’t recognize it as quite that, but Ming knew it took a cop like her to know the names and addresses of the chief perpetrators.
Angel had come face-to-face with more of the real stuff in the past two waking weeks of her life than she’d ever imagined confronting before, and it wasn’t like the easy answers of her ivory tower theology teachers or show business hysterics. Few people, even clerical types, really believed in evil anymore, which was one reason evil kept winning.
For Angel, it was a matter of simply not understanding how God could allow her to sink to this. What had she done to deserve such a fate, or was she a new Job, punished simply to show piety to the devil? If that was the case, it wasn’t a good bet. She felt—dirty, abused, and for the first time she knew the glimmerings of real hatred. With that came some wisdom, at least; now, at last, she could taste what Jeremiah Wong Kincaid must feel. But Wallinchky was as evil as she could imagine, and he had been in Kincaid’s power, as it were, and was instead used merely as a tool. If Wallinchky wasn’t evil enough to be an end object in himself, then what must that Hadun creature be like?
She didn’t get over it, but began to learn to cope with it, much to Ming’s relief.
Finally, Angel had to ask, “How did he do what he did? How can it be possible to do that to someone?”
“He’s got us hooked into the neural net running this entire complex,” Ming guessed. “We’re like any of the automated stuff here, from the cleaning machines to the medlab stuff to the rest of the automated place. I have tried to walk down certain hallways here, or enter certain rooms, and I simply cannot. It’s not willpower—my legs just will not do it. Just after that time you tried harming yourself. You couldn’t. We’re a part of this place now, just like the furniture. There was a lot done to us internally, as well as giving us these limbs and eyes.”
“But—I can understand how it stops us, but how did it get me to do—that? I mean, I had never even done it before.”
“Programming. We were ordered to go in there, ordered on the bed, and then a routine was run that not only gave us exactly what we were to do, but provided the proper hormones and other brain chemicals to trigger it all.”
“Is this what he does to the others who work for him?”
Ming shrugged. “Probably he has ones like us in all his dwellings, but we’re not real portable this way. We’re not just prisoners in this place, we’ve literally become a part of it. It is, I suspect, what he does to people he wants to keep around but who are too ‘hot’ to travel. My people will be looking for me, yours for you. Our genetic codes are on file. So, as he said, we’ve become part of his collection.”
It was not the most pleasant of thoughts.
It also became clear that whatever the medical program was doing, there was no sign of regeneration procedures— requiring either sequestering in a tank or removal of each artificial limb one at a time and giving it intensive treatment—and transplanting specially grown limbs from living tissue also didn’t seem to be in the cards. Instead, the artificial limbs appeared to be integrating into their nervous systems, so that they now felt almost normal, even if they still looked very strange. They exercised in an elaborate exercise room at least a couple of hours a day; this was not a choice. It obviously wasn’t to build up leg and arm muscles, but it got the heart pumping and made them tight in the stomach and very firm in the breasts. They were also growing hair; for Angel, it was a strange sensation, since apparently there was a genetic trait against it in her sect. It itched at first, but then began to come in at a rate much faster than normal growth. It was straight, thick, wiry, and jet-black.